This is war

The US-led attack on Iraq in 1991 was one of the worst-reported conflicts in history. A system of media management kept the violent deaths of some 40,000 people out of the public view. War photographer Don McCullin explains the crucial role photojournalists have in recording events

Sitting here in a cottage in Somerset, I should perhaps be enjoying the birdsong and the soft rolling hills. I'm not, because I live on a military flight path, and instead of the birds I hear the engine noise of dive-bombing aircraft flown by pilots who are readying themselves for a war in Iraq. C-130 transport planes are streaming into the air force base at Brize Norton, and the flapping sound of Chinook helicopters keeps putting me back in Vietnam. OK, I think, any moment now the doors are going to open and I'll jump out and run across those rice fields.

If you are a decent human being, war is going to offend you because it has no purpose other than to satisfy someone's desire for power and profit. And it is the little people who suffer. At the first whiff of trouble, the rich and the informed get into their Mercedes-Benzes and off-road vehicles and leave. The poor people, the very last of the dregs of society, can't escape. They get the bill.

I got into war photography because I felt I could approach it in a more dignified way than other people. I felt compassion for the victims of war, and I believed I would never do anything to betray that compassion. But I had not been to war for several years when, in 1991, a friend of mine, the war correspondent Charles Glass, telephoned from Damascus, and I suddenly felt the need to go out and join him. A short time later, we were in Iraq, fleeing north with the Kurds, who were being driven up into the mountains to die by Iraqi troops. I remember visiting a hospital there when they brought in a boy who had been hit by one of Saddam's helicopter bombs. The no-fly zone imposed by the allies applied only to fixed-wing aircraft, so they flew over the Kurds in helicopters and rolled bombs out of the side. This boy was burnt from head to toe; his whole body was bleeding. I remember thinking, then, that I should give this profession up.

Of course, it is the photographer's job to show some of that horror, to say: this is the real war, this is what it's like on the ground, this is what war does to you. That job that has been becoming increasingly difficult ever since the US decided that the media had lost the war in Vietnam for them. In 1982 came the Falklands war, and Margaret Thatcher's government decided not to make the mistake the Americans had of giving reporters and photographers free access to the hostilities. Instead, they set up the "pool" system, in which a small number of journalists and photographers, supposedly picked at random, supplied copy and images to be transmitted back home by the military. The movements of the pool members were controlled by armed forces personnel.

This system was used in the last Gulf war and will be revived if, or when, the next begins. As in 1991, reporters and photographers will have to decide whether to toe the military line (assuming they win a place in the pool - years after the Falklands, which I was unable to cover, I discovered that I had been blacklisted from the start) or to try to make their own way to the action, without protection and in constant danger of arrest. And if too many choose the second option, that will create its own problems. In the old days, if you came across a road block, you might be able to talk your way though. That doesn't work if there are a dozen of you.

Of course, when the bullets start flying, the military don't want hundreds of dead or injured journalists on their hands. But the fact is that we embarrass them by exposing the holes in their propaganda. When I was in northern Iraq, the Allies were giving the impression that there wasn't an intact Mig fighter in the whole of the country; they even had the aerial photos to prove it. Yet we found three or four fighters in perfect condition, hidden under camouflage awnings.

It rankles to know that you are being so easily manoeuvred by the powers that be. But you sometimes get to the stage where you are begging to be allowed to the front; to be, in effect, given the chance to be killed. I have lost enough friends over the years to know that this is a real danger.

Let's suppose that you do get to where the action is. What makes a good photograph? Do you focus on the dead, like many of the photographers in these pages, or on the living? Is it still possible to speak for the Iraqis incinerated in the American ambush on the Basra road, or do you concentrate on the injured, the women and children, the civilians? Do you want to create art, or to take pictures? Some war photographers describe themselves as artists - all photographers have a leaning to be artistic - but is war the right place to indulge this inclination? There is a danger of walking through the killing fields and thinking of Goya and modern icons, of press awards or prize ceremonies at the Hague.

I have only ever considered myself a photographer - nothing more, nothing less. I went to war and thought of people and pain, not exhibitions and awards. I looked into people's eyes and they would look back and there would be something like a meeting of guilt. As a war photographer, you cannot escape guilt, particularly when the man in front of you who is just about to be shot appeals to you to help him.

Photography is not just about photographs; it's about communication. It's not about you. It's not about art. You're there to record. Sometimes, all too rarely, what you record is acts of human decency, of kindness and compassion - I have seen men cradling dying comrades and weeping. But that's the only side of war you will see that is beautiful.